My grandma died at 4:30 AM this morning. It wasn't unexpected, but it is still leaves me feeling sad. I got a call from my father this morning letting me know that it happened. I talked with my mom afterwards, and she seemed quite upbeat.

Grandma Petra had a stroke a while back, and my mom has been taken care of her (Petra is my mom's mother). My mom was really sad that her mom was in such condition. I think we all feel a sense of relief that she's not suffering anymore.

I did get to talk to Abuelita last week on the phone. That was the first time since her stroke that she sounded lucid. I knew that was going to be the last time I would be talking to her.

I did not want to hold this in, and talking about it here gives me a sense of closure. I hope that Abuelita finds Braulio, her husband, soon on the other side.

One good thing that I got as her legacy is a warm feeling towards blonds. She was naturally blond, so that's where I get that. ;) It took me a long time to figure that out. Thanks Abulelita!

I spent last night working on SVNManagerLib. I was adding support for the new global configuration command-line switch that came with Subversion 1.5. I got the bulk of it done, but I still need to make sure the ancilliary code works correctly. I found that the user code was not working correctly. It was time for bed when I got to this point.

I'm wishing that I had integration tests done already, for exactly this sort of situation. I ordered Working Effectively with Legacy Code to help me with unit and integration testing. I haven't had the chance to do unit testing in the workplace, so I have to take this into my own hands.

Anyways, this feature will be pushed out with PainlessSVN 1.1. I still have a couple more features that I need to get completely done, before I get 1.1 out the door.

I got a view attached to the server leaf in PainlessSVN. This will give you at a glance info on what version of svnserve you are running, and whether or not it is running as a service. Here's a screenie:

Since Murphy is not messing with me anymore, I have been able to get a flurry of stuff moving forward. I'm also working on finishing up the load dump file feature. Here's a screenie of this:

I'm adding support for the new command-line switch for svnserve that lets you specify a config file that will be use for all your repositories. This is only available if you are using Subversion 1.5 and newer. Here's a screenie of that:

After much work reinstalling Vista and Visual Studio 2008, I found out that I still can't debug 32bit MMC 3.0 snapins in Vista 64. You still need to attach the debugger manually to the running process. Unfortunately, this means that you won't be able to debug stuff while your code is loading.

I really was not ready to go back to 32 bit, so I compromised by creating a VMWare image that contains Windows XP SP3, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and all the other necessary dev tools.

I now have a rig that I know always lets me debug. TortoiseSVN makes it simple to keep my VM and desktop synched.

Score that a WIN!

SAPIEN Technologies recently released a free tool to create GUIs for your PowerShell cmdlets. Here's a blog post with a screenshot. It's called PrimalForm.

It can be downloaded from here. (quick registration needed)

Well, I found out that Visual Studio 2005 breakpoints do not work in Windows Vista 64bit. It is a known issue.

Just-In-Time (JIT) Debugging of an elevated process will fail

The workaround is to attach the debugger manually. Bummer! I think I'm going to migrate PainlessSVN to Visual Studio 2008. Thankfully, I already have it installed.

My employer's, The Generations Network (TGN), headquarters are in a very nice location. We are surrounded by mountains on 3 sides. I took some pictures with my new T-Mobile Shadow. The camera in this baby is much better than any of the other phones I've ever had. Almost better than the digital camera that we own too!

I put the pictures on their own page, so that they don't bog down the blog. Click on the title, then select the link that says "Next Page."

My workstation is finally back to "normal." I ended up having to get a new motherboard and cpu. This was frustrating because I had to change from AMD to Intel. All of the PC part stores have closed in my area. PC Computer and CompUSA were the biggest ones out here. Makes me wish we had a Fry's over here.

I didn't want to wait a week and a half to have something else mailed to me, so I went to a local reputable computer builder. I went to PC Laptops. They hooked me up with an Asus  P5QL-EM mobo, and an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.53 GHz) cpu.

Total damage to my wallet was $383.56.

The most aggravating thing was that in the end, it was a flaky DIMM that caused all of the trouble. So now, I have a perfectly good AMD cpu and MSI mobo sitting on my office.

I now have an Acronis True Image with all of my stuff installed. So when this happens again, and you can bet that it will happen again, will get me going in about an hour.